| Equipment: |
80-mm Meade model 300 refractor working at
600-mm fl with Starlight HX516 CCD camera. Manual setting circles on
mount. |
| Exposure/Processing: |
4 x 1 minute unguided stacked together |
| Location: |
"Heavy light pollution of Greenwich,
Connecticut and surrounding towns had to be overcome." |
| Notes
from the Imagers: |
The experience of imaging Pluto was
one of the most rewarding events I've had in astronomy. It was hard to
find the planet because the maps we were using from sky&tel were not
the best... we ended up making our own 'map' by imaging the area with a
50mm fl (25mm diameter) camera lens and found our way around using this
image as a map. This setup got us down to mag 13.
BTW we did image pluto with a 200mm telephoto lens (50mm diameter),
but we didn't do a second image because the lens had a defect (made double
stars of everything). I'm convinced that a 25mm diameter lens of 200mm fl
would get it!
Among the many lessons learned during this challenge was that CCD
cameras are just incredible!
Rick Bria
Angelo Nunez |
